


secrets

by venndaai



Category: Benjamin January Mysteries - Barbara Hambly
Genre: Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, Alternate Universe - X-Men Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 14:55:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20472893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: “Ben,” Olympe said, “watch out for that lawman of yours.”





	secrets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DoreyG](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoreyG/gifts).

> I wasn't sure how far you'd read in the series, so I decided not to tie this to any canonical events and just imagine it as an alternate timeline.

“Ben,” Olympe said, “watch out for that lawman of yours.”

The house was warm and loud with the bustling noises of Paul and the children washing up after a very good dinner, and bright with many candles and lamps; but January felt a chill go down his spine. He said, very calmly, deliberately light, “He’s not my lawman.”

“He’s sharp,” Olympe said. January made himself look up, into her face. Even in the soft glow of the lamps it seemed angular and full of shadows. “And he’s got a fix on you.”

She had glimpsed Lieutenant Abishag Shaw for the first time earlier that evening, for no longer than half a minute, from the vantage point of her porch, and the lieutenant had remained on the other side of the street, tipping his hat to January and his sister before melting away into the twilight. But half a minute was all Olympe Corbier needed, most of the time. 

“He’s a friend,” January said. “I think.” Felt guilt on both sides. For not more ardently defending a man who’d saved his life. But also for, in some small way, betraying the principles he and Olympe had lived by, the claustrophobic rules that had governed them as they grew up together. 

Friendship was a luxury Livia’s children couldn’t afford. 

“Just be careful,” Olympe said, “that’s all,” and January kissed her cheek, and said, “Be careful yourself.”

  


Friendship was a strange word, January reflected later, music racing under his fingers as light reflected all through the room around him, bouncing off of crystal glassware and an army of mirrors, spilling out of grand windows into the cool winter night outside. He had friendship of a sort in some of his better patrons. Something much closer in the company of his fellow musicians. 

Hannibal Sefton, between sets, stumbled into the kitchen of the grand house to cough blood onto a threadbare handkerchief, and January offered him juice and touched his forehead, solicitous concern masking the truth of his actions. The fiddler’s illness lay deep within his lungs, white growths that resisted any attempt to permanently banish them. All January could do was push what Olympe called life force from that green source inside himself into the body of his friend. The cough eased. The fiddler’s eyes grew clearer. January was careful not to let his own fatigue show.

If he could perform a miracle cure… he wanted to think that he would do so without hesitation, would do anything to ease Hannibal’s suffering, despite the risk of discovery. But God had not put that choice in front of him. All he could do was keep Hannibal alive.

Hannibal would start to suspect something eventually, if neither of them died in the next few years, if he survived longer than other victims of the consumption. But January did not have to worry about that tonight. 

Friendship was a word easy to apply to Hannibal Sefton. Harder to fit it around a relationship defined not by shared sweat and lemonade, the joy of music and laughter, but by badly written notes left on January’s doorstep, or awkward conversations at cafe tables or food stalls, spoken across a distance unbridged in public. 

Someone was murdered, someone was kidnapped, someone disappeared, and January could go where Shaw couldn’t, hear what Shaw couldn’t. It was starting to feel familiar. 

“Sorry to ask this of you, Maestro,” Shaw said, jaw working the ever-present tobacco, gray eyes fixed on January’s face. If January was being honest, he didn’t know what to do with that regard. He was used to people looking past him, or at the ground. He associated that direct look with the desperate, those trying to find an unlikely savior in their hour of need. But this was different.

Most of the time, January was glad he hadn’t been given the gifts that ran in the women of his family. He had no desire to peer into the dark hearts of his fellow men. Seeing the results of that darkness in the world was curse enough. 

But sometimes- 

  


Make use of what you’ve been given, Livia had told her children. But don’t flaunt it. Don’t get caught. 

Olympe had given this all the consideration she generally gave to her mother’s advice, and run as fast as she could to the shadow world, where her powers were understood as a natural part of the fabric of reality. 

“Most of them don’t got gifts of their own,” she’d confided to her brother. “Still, the spirits are real, and they can come to anyone. It’s only folks like me who can call them when I’d like.”

She’d looked at him then and said, “You gonna get tired, living in so many different worlds, Ben.” 

There was a tension between them. The unspoken accusation, that she could make at any time, and didn’t. Had he taken her path, practiced voodoo, he could have healed more openly, devoted his life to it, instead of doing what he could, when he could, when the fever and cholera came. 

But he had wanted to believe his power came from God. 

Sometimes, in darker moments, he wondered why God would have given such a gift to him, and not to a man who could have opened a successful medical practice in Paris, and performed miracle cures on the great and powerful. 

“It runs in the family,” Livia had told them once. “On your grandmother’s side. We keep it secret. You don’t want to attract the wrong attention, in this world.” 

“Your children,” January had asked Olympe, soon after his return to New Orleans.

“They got their own gifts, yes,” Olympe had said. “They know not to show off.” 

January hoped she’d found kinder ways of teaching that lesson than Livia had with her children.  
  
  


He thought Olympe was wrong, about Shaw. The Kaintuck guardsman watched everything with those cool rain-colored eyes. He didn’t spare January particular consideration. 

He wanted to think she was wrong.

He broached the topic one evening, in Dominique’s beautiful cottage on the Rue Burgundy, good food warming his stomach, the exquisite beauty of the dining room and Minou’s chatter calming his nerves. 

“That lieutenant’s a strange one,” his sister said, frowning. “He did help us out with that horrible affair last year, though-”

“Minou,” January said quietly with a sigh, head tilted towards the kitchen, where Therese and the cook were cleaning up. 

She sighed too, and said, with slightly lower volume, “He doesn’t seem all that bad, for an American. But it’s odd, Ben. I couldn’t get any specifics from him at all. I could tell he felt something quite strongly, whenever he was looking at you, but it was like we were in separate rooms and the walls were too thick for me to hear what he was saying.” 

That was ominous, and not particularly helpful, but he thanked his sister anyway, and promised to visit again in a few days. He thought she appreciated the honesty of his presence. Dominique St. Janvier could wrap anyone around her little finger, but her brother had at least always been able to tell when she was doing it. 

  


Things came to a head, one muggy summer night, out in the bayou, a round penny moon hanging low, the night darkening and brightening as clouds passed. 

A killer, lurking among the cypresses. January, muddy and exhausted, pondering how he never meant to die somewhere like this. Considering that Shaw probably hadn’t, either. The ghosts of Shaw’s chilly mountain forests overlaid for a moment onto the hot dark night. 

A hoarse warning cry, and Shaw, eyes so much sharper than January’s, movements so much faster, slamming into him, knocking them both into the knee-high water. Shaw keeping his rifle high and dry, firing a moment later. A scream, and the splash of someone else’s body. 

The weight of Shaw’s body against his, and the quiet whisper of Shaw’s swearing. 

“Are you hit?” January asked. The tightness in his chest already knew the answer.

“Wasn’t quite fast enough,” Shaw said, through gritted teeth already starting to chatter. “My apologies, Maestro. Didn’t mean it to go down this way.”

“Don’t worry about it,” January said, as he pulled Shaw up onto drier land. The man was skinny under his coat, almost as tall as January but lean and hard as jerky. January laid him down on the damp ground as gently as he could. The other man was panting, the sound not quite drowned out by the loud chorus of insects and frogs. 

There wasn’t enough light for a decent examination, but rolling up Shaw’s bloodsoaked shirt and exploring with gentle touch confirmed January’s initial fears. He found himself looking at Shaw’s face. The man’s jaw was tight with pain, but his eyes were open, and glittered with moonlight. January saw that his patient already knew the diagnosis. 

January wasted a moment on mental swearing and berating of the Almighty. 

He hadn’t asked for this end to the mystery. 

“Is there anythin’ to be done?” Shaw asked, with the quiet resignation of one who knows the answer.

January did not know his own answer, however, until the moment he spoke. “Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid this will hurt.” He reached inside himself, found the green core of his power, let it pool into his hands.

A long, narrow hand, pale under layers of grime, grabbed his wrist with a grip of iron. “That ain’t necessary, Maestro,” Shaw said.

He knows, January thought, illogically. It was illogical. There was no way for Shaw to have guessed his secret. 

“In my medical opinion, it is,” January said, and pressed his hand flat against Shaw’s bare skin. 

What he experienced next was unlike anything he’d felt before in his forty years healing broken mortal bodies. What met his power was not the usual banked flicker of an injured human’s life force, but the rage of a forest fire, red-hot and blistering. It lapped up his power, consumed it like kindling and looked for more. After what seemed like a lifetime of struggle, January managed to break free with a cry.

He was back in his own body in the swamp, and Shaw, still lying on his back in the mud, had begun to writhe. January could just about see that the terrible wound had sealed itself, under the blood. Usually patients he had brought back from such an abyss slept for days afterward, but Shaw was not asleep. His fingers clawed the mud. His lips peeled back from his gums with a snarl, and January startled to see teeth growing longer and sharper as he watched. 

Shaw sat up, and shook himself, like a dog. Slowly, reluctantly, the fangs retreated. The shaking stopped.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” Shaw said, ruefully. “The wolf wakes up when I’m hurt, you see. And I believe it’s got a taste for powers like yours.”

“My god,” January said, at a loss for any other words. 

“Don’t know God’s got much to do with it,” Shaw said. “Would be nice to think so, I suppose. I’m purely sorry about this, Maestro. Can you stand?”

January tried, and sank back down to his knees almost immediately. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so drained, not even after fighting the fever for his nephew’s life. 

“Sit yourself right there on the knee of that cypress a spell,” Shaw said. “I’ll keep the snakes and gators away.”

“Wait,” January said, though all he wanted to do was let the blackness rise up. “Are you- all right?”

“Been shot before,” Shaw said, and January just saw the edge of a wince, in the part of the shadow that had a face. “I Turned, couldn’t control it. Think my other shape heals better. Spent a day in the mountains not knowin’ what I did, woke up at home in bed with just a scar.”

He crouched, and looked into January’s face. January blinked. The moon had appeared from behind the clouds, and he could see it reflected in those eyes. 

“You thought you were alone,” Shaw said softly. 

January was silent. His family’s secrets were not his to tell. 

“I had my kin,” Shaw said. “Meanin’ pretty much the whole town. Not all of them changed, but they all knew the secret. Decided I wanted to be more than a wolf, so I came down the river. Though I admit some of the wolf parts come in handy, huntin’ those as don’t want to be found.”

“I can imagine,” January said. He felt like laughing. 

“Just as the ability to cure death itself comes in handy as a surgeon, I imagine.”

“I can’t do that,” January said, the laughter dying in his chest. “I do what I can. But I’m not God.” 

“Thank Heavens for that, I suppose,” Shaw said. “Hard enough bein’ more than a man.” 

He leaned a little closer. January thought he could feel heat radiating off of his lanky body, even in the warmth of the night. For a moment he thought Shaw’s hand was going to touch January’s face. For a moment he wanted it to.

Instead he felt that iron grip on his shoulder. “Rest,” Shaw said. “No critters will bother you.”

January leaned against the rough bark of a cypress, and drifted in and out of awareness. He thought felt a man’s hands on his shoulders, a concerned touch brushing hair back from his forehead; then he blinked and saw the shape of a wolf, outlined in void against the slightly less dark night around it. He heard the murmur of a human voice, and the rumble of a lupine growl. 

But perhaps it was only dreams.

It was very strange, that out in the middle of black nothingness, accompanied only by something even more strange than himself, was the least lonely Benjamin January had felt in quite a long time.

  
  



End file.
